this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Why do we use base 60 for time and base 10 for everything else. Why has no one decided to integrate it. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by atrax@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Thought of this in the shower this morning, if anyone has an answer I'd be very interested!

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[–] Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

As you said there is really nothing special about 10 and you could easily redefine prefixes to whatever base you want.

In base 12 a day has 20 hours, an hour has 50 minutes and a week has 120 hours. The numbers are as arbitrary as before. Except the 0th index is always 0 in these cases.

While the origin has been explained well, a base change really doesn't solve the underlying problem with time as we define it. I don't think this has a good solution and probably doesn't need one.